There is a peculiar mental state wherein the subject is at once absent and all pervasive. This is the dream state. As Adorno puts it:
In the dream, where the subject, absent from the start, colours and permeates everything that happens from the wings. (Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, p. 87).
The subject is here not a kind of isolated point, something which has predicates or relations to objects, it has, rather, flooded the objects in question. But again, there is a puzzling logic of inversion at work, for it is here, when the subject saturates the world of phenomenon, that what confronts us is most alien, most ‘uncanny’. Our dreams can frighten or confound us. The paradox: that a world flooded with our own subjectivity suddenly recoils from us into unfamiliarity, repels us at the moment when we are beyond even closeness. The subject, completely immersed in itself, becomes a stranger to itself.